Jeff Sexton Writes

"Nothing is so powerful as an insight into human nature... what compulsions drive a man, what instincts dominate his action... if you know these things about a man you can touch him at the core of his being."

And to do that, I’d like to com­bine that with a quote from the open­ing para­graph of Break­through Adver­tis­ing, writ­ten by the leg­endary Eugene Schwartz:

“Copy can­not cre­ate desire for a prod­uct. It can only take the hopes, dreams, fears, and desires that already exist in the hearts of mil­lions of peo­ple and focus those already exist­ing desires onto a par­tic­u­lar prod­uct. This is the copy­writ­ers task: not to cre­ate this mass desire – but to chan­nel and direct it.” [Empha­sis in original]

When Roy tells us that you can’t sell hap­pi­ness unless unhap­pi­ness is the default option, he is essen­tially telling us that the desire for your solu­tion has to already exist. You have to be answer­ing a ques­tion that peo­ple are already asking.

No mat­ter how much peo­ple may des­per­ately need your prod­uct (accord­ing to you, at least), if they don’t FEEL as if they need what you sell and they don’t gen­er­ally WANT what you sell, then you’ve got a prod­uct that adver­tis­ing won’t help you sell.

Why Desire Trumps Need

My favorite illus­tra­tion of this comes from this Calvin and Hobbes strip wherein Calvin attempts to sell a “swift kick in the butt” for $1 and can’t fig­ure out why busi­ness is so slow when every­body he knows needs what he’s selling.

So if desire trumps need, the ques­tion becomes: how can you desire what you already have? Answer: you can’t. You can’t pos­si­bly feel the want of some­thing – can’t feel “in need of it” – if you already have it. If you’re sell­ing “health” the per­son has to feel as if they don’t cur­rently HAVE health. They have to have a health problem.

So where does this put pre­ven­ta­tives like vit­a­mins and exer­cise and such? Easy: these things are sold either as:

The cure to a health prob­lem – Peo­ple start tak­ing vit­a­mins and sup­ple­ments and exer­cise because they feel as if they’re fat or can’t keep up with their kids or have high cho­les­terol or joint pain, and so on.

A way to regain some­thing that’s already been lost, i.e., Youth — Most sup­ple­ments and exer­cise pro­grams are sold as anti-aging or youth-restoration solu­tions to peo­ple who feel that they are rapidly los­ing their youth.

A way to gain an edge over the com­pe­ti­tion – sell­ing per­for­mance rather than health.

This is why Roy also specif­i­cally addresses sell­ing health in this quote (also taken from Friday’s post):

“PROBLEM: Sell­ing health is a bad idea. Most peo­ple already have health. If they keep their health, they’re not going to give you any credit for that. Health isn’t mea­sur­able unless you’re cur­rently sick and this reg­i­men cures you. As I said before, weight loss and body shape are mea­sur­able. Does this pro­gram accom­plish those things?”

What to do when unhap­pi­ness isn’t the default option

So if unhap­pi­ness isn’t already rec­og­nized as the default option, the copywriter/advertiser has to do one of two things:

Find at least one aspect of the prod­uct or ser­vice that cus­tomers are NOT happy with and use your copy to agi­tate that prob­lem, or

Con­nect a prob­lem or unhap­pi­ness they cur­rently have to the prod­uct or ser­vice they are cur­rently using.

Com­i­cally exag­ger­at­ing the dif­fi­culty and time require­ments of chop­ping with a knife.

Tying the customer’s cur­rent lack of healthy, deli­cious, and inter­est­ing foods and snacks in their diet to the inabil­ity to quickly chop foods.

Watch the video and you’ll see exactly what I mean when you hear phrases like: “You know you hate mak­ing sal­ads, that’s why you don’t have any salad in your diet” and “Stop hav­ing bor­ing tuna; stop hav­ing a bor­ing life.” No slap chop = unhap­pi­ness as the default option my friend

Of course, some­times adver­tis­ers take it to the next level and seek to actively pro­mote and instil an unhappy dis­po­si­tion in their audi­ence. They can then return to their own default posi­tion: sell­ing hap­pi­ness.
.-= Ryan Spanger´s last blog ..Unlearn =-.

Peo­ple want to avoid pain more than attain plea­sure. If you don’t estab­lish the prob­lem, they’ll never buy what you have to offer even if they need it. When I’m talk­ing to my prospects, I always ask ques­tions and try to iden­tify their prob­lems. Nice arti­cle.
.-= Ellie Yamane´s last blog ..Face­book Mar­ket­ing Les­son– Fix Your Thumb­nail =-.

Yup, adver­tis­ing has absolutely been blamed (and rightly so, I think) for cre­at­ing anx­i­eties in peo­ple in order to sell prod­uct. Do you have BO? Are you thin enough? Is that a zit on your face? That sweater is so last sea­son! And so on. The phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal indus­try even has a process of “First You Invent The Dis­ease” in order to mar­ket drugs meant to cure it. They do this because it works.

Ellie,

Thanks for com­ment­ing. I find that (good) sales­peo­ple are almost always locked onto these psy­cho­log­i­cal real­i­ties. Far more so than most mar­keters and even a fair few copywriters.

- Jeff

dirt on
11.10.2010

I knew a great sales­man how told me the basics of sell­ing are …

Cre­ate a prob­lem … then Solve that problem.

Some­times I think busi­ness peo­ple for­get this and will put the Solu­tion in front of the Horse. They are so enam­ored with the solu­tion they for­get to define the prob­lem … and visa-versa.

Apple is actu­ally a really inter­est­ing exam­ple. They some­how man­age to cre­ate a desire for their new cool­ness every time they develop a new prod­uct. Not hav­ing it means unhap­pi­ness because you would not be as cool as the oth­ers. Pretty nifty.
.-= Mar­tin Stellar´s last blog ..Ethics in mar­ket­ing Really =-.

Bril­liant arti­cle Jeff — “focus those already exist­ing desires onto a par­tic­u­lar prod­uct” This is the key that most small busi­nesses for­get — it starts with know­ing your customer’s pain — If small busi­ness own­ers just to spent their time think­ing about or learn­ing about this it would make a big dif­fer­ence to the prod­ucts they make and how they mar­ket their business.

Yup. When you’re intro­duced to some­thing that makes your old options seem cruddy in com­par­i­son, you instantly become unhappy with your old stuff. The rea­son that so many new and improved what­ev­ers fail is that there is no notice­able dif­fer­ence when using them. They don’t make you unhappy with what­ever you’re cur­rently using, so you don’t buy.

One of the things that Gillette does bril­liantly is to make sure their new razors are always markedly bet­ter than their old ones. It’s never a slight dif­fer­ence. It’s always a blow you away dif­fer­ence that almost forces you to pony up for the new system/razors. Inter­nally, I think they have 21 mea­sures of shav­ing excel­lence and a new razor tech­nol­ogy has to pro­vide a cer­tain level of improve­ment on some­thing like 18 of them in order to get released to the pub­lic. So Gillette actu­ally TURNSDOWN the abil­ity to release new improve­ments in order to main­tain that high level of con­trast between old and new razors.

This same con­trast is also why it can be so painful to be exposed to great wine, gourmet cof­fee, etc. — because it takes the qual­ity you had been (pretty much) sat­is­fied with and ruins it for you. You become trapped into pay­ing for the good stuff or suf­fer­ing through your old, now-crappy stuff ; )